Bone Music

A little over sixty years ago, Robert Johnson died of poison in a little town up off the bluff in Arkansas.

In an hour, a little girl named Lisa will die of cancer.

Such different deaths — but linked, horribly and inevitably, by the crime Robert Johnson committed in the hour that he died.

That Crime was Judgment Day: Robert Johnson sang Judgment Day, the song to end the world, as he lay dying in that shack up off the Mississippi River bluff — and nothing anywhere in the world has been right since.

Because the Kings of Hoodoo died to save the world from Robert Johnson’s folly, and when they died the secret order that underlay our lives died with them.

Those Kings ruled the hearts and minds of everyone along the Mississippi lowlands — all the way north to Chicago. They didn’t rule so you could see, but they ruled all the same, guiding each of us from deep inside. (You and I know these Hoodoo wizards as great Blues singers, dead and buried. But they were not dead — only hidden from the world.)

Without the Wizard Kings to guide us, the land and all the world have gone astray — and the day’s at hand when even this new decrepit order will leak away, to leave us in a world of chaos and destruction.

There was a notion, long ago, that the Great American Novel would be a book that defined us as a people — a Nibelungenlied for America; an Odyssey for Main Street. Bone Music reaches out to embrace America exactly that way: down inside the apocalyptic is an author trying to name his people by their secret name.